The internet today relies TOO MUCH on just a few big players. When one of them stops working, half the world is impacted because too many services, in my opinion, depend on them. “Too big to fail,” some might say. “Single Point of Failure,” I respond.”
The strength of the internet has always been its extreme decentralization, which is now less evident due to this phenomenon.
In this article, I want to show how easy it is to create a self-hosted CDN using OpenBSD and just two external packages: Varnish and Lego.
↫ Stefano Marinelli
Stefano Marinelli is a gem of a person, and a great voice for the wider BSD community. In this article he covers building your own CDN using OpenBSD, and a few days ago he published a similar article, but using FreeBSD instead. These are excellent resources for anyone who wants to take self-hosting and data ownership to the next level, even cutting out big players like Cloudflare which often don’t have the best interests of us regular people at heart. It’s probably not for everyone, but odds are if you’re reading OSNews, you might be capable of and interested in doing this.
And Marinelli’s point about the internet being overly reliant on a just a few small players is well taken. We often focus on the front-end of the monopolised internet – Google, Apple, Microsoft, and so on – but the backend and infrastructure often also suffers from the same problem. These articles focus on effectively replacing Cloudflare, but something like Amazon Web Services is also a prime example of a service that’s basically become too big to fail. That’s not at all how the internet was supposed to work, but unfettered capitalism ruins everything, and this is no exception.
While a few of us breaking away from the monopolies and building our own alternatives isn’t going to have any material impact, it at least aides in a cleaner conscience.